Collision with Chronos

The Oblique Entity was already reciprocating on their contact stream, expressing its willingness for the exchange. The cybernetic servitor moved into position to operate the equipment. His heart thumping, Ascar stepped into the transparent sphere. The hatch closed behind him as he sat down in the central chair, and then he was in darkness.

The transceiver seized his senses and snatched them out of intelligible time, hurling them in a direction no compass could ever find.

At first there was only silence, and continued darkness. Then out of that darkness a voice said suddenly: “I am here. You have arrived. What do you want?”

The voice, though loud, was smooth and confidential. It seemed to be spoken close to his ear – or rather, to both his ears. Behind the voice was a silence, but behind that silence Ascar fancied he could hear a whispering whistle, like the susurration that sometimes accompanied radio transmissions.

“I want to see you,” Ascar said into the darkness.

“How do you wish to see me?”

Ascar didn’t understand the question for a moment; then he answered: “I want to see you as you are.”

“Very well. Here is our physical reality.”

The change was brutally abrupt. Ascar suddenly found himself amid an uproar in a long gallery. He was kneeling, for the height of the gallery was only about four feet and gave approximately the same room on either side, though it stretched away ahead of him seemingly into infinity. Furthermore it was only one of a multitude of such structures arranged around him, and which he glimpsed through the iron frameworks separating them. And those frameworks contained —

He inspected the complex closely. As near as he could judge, the objects would best be described as machines. The galleries were, in fact, avenues for the siting of a continuous machine process which clattered, rotated and shuffled through indefinably intricate operations. Ascar was in the midst of a roaring, close-packed factory of vast extent, like some industrialised hell.

“Did you construct this?” he asked into thin air.

“No,” came the immediate answer, easily audible despite the deafening racket. “This is us – a small part of me. All this came into existence spontaneously, as a result of the process of time. I/We is not biological.”

Ascar felt himself moving forward. The floor offered no perceptible resistance to his knees, but a hot wind played against his face. The endless galleries swept past blurrily as he gathered speed and went darting into a claustrophobic infinity.

Then, without warning, he came to a stop. The machine complex was behind him in the form of a towering serried wall; its array, he recognised, was reminiscent of the array of atoms in a metal.

He faced now a huge gulf from whose depths came tumultuous boiling, a giving forth of steam clouds and acid vapours which seared his skin. Its size was impossible to judge. Ascar moved along the edge of this infernal pit until he came to another of its boundaries: a second wall of solid-packed quasi-machinery. But this time there were no narrow galleries through the honeycomb; the whole mass was impenetrable, none of its interstices being large enough to admit his body.

He glanced overhead, attracted by a regular, gigantic noise. Slanting obliquely over the space above him was something like a moving belt, or a high-speed printing press. It roared on its way at a colossal speed, for all that it must have been a hundred miles long.

“Perhaps you would prefer to meet me in different surroundings,” the Oblique Entity said. Everything vanished, and was replaced.

Ascar was sitting in a moderately sized room. The walls were of pale blue decorated with a white cornice. The light, coming from an unseen source, was very radiant, reminding him of sunlight. Before Ascar stood a table of polished walnut.

A door opened. In walked a young woman who sat down opposite him. Her skin was silver-blue. A slight smile was on her lips. Her eyes were bright blue, also, but they looked beyond, Ascar, as if they weren’t functional.

“Good day,” she said in a pleasant, full voice. “Is this more agreeable?”

Ascar took a moment to recover himself. “But this isn’t you as you really are, is it?” he said then.

“No, that is true.”

Ascar was vaguely disappointed. “Then it’s just an illusion you’re putting through the all-sense receiver. I didn’t come all this way looking for illusions.”

“Incorrect: it is no illusion. I have constructed the environment as a physical reality, into which I then projected your senses. Even the woman is a real living woman.”

Now Ascar was startled. “You can do that – in a moment?”

A pause. “Not in a moment, exactly. To produce the woman took a hundred years. Duration is of no consequence when time can be turned in a circle.”

So that was it, Ascar thought. It was the Production Retort all over again, but on an even larger scale. Here, the beginning and the end of a lengthy process could be bent around to occupy successive moments. He mulled over another point.